Author: Jon Beck

Financial services businesses have undergone more change in the last three years than in the last three decades and the market is expected to accelerate for the foreseeable future. For decades the prevailing stereotype of a technology finance professional was one who was conservative to adopt new technologies, either due to internal policy or the complexity to move off of antiquated, rigid systems (yes, I’m talking about VAX systems and green screens that are still in use today) and outdated and monolithic data schemas.

FinTech, which is defined as the evolving intersection of technology and financial services, including all sorts of companies that may operate in insurance, payments, asset management, and personal finance management, demands that engineering, product, and creative design teams within financial institutions (both the incumbents, startups, and upstarts) need to respond quickly to market dynamics, underlying technical changes and improvements to their services. To accomplish this, the need for the right talent, with the right backgrounds is imperative to compete and represents massive new opportunities for software engineers.

I remember in 2009 when the personal finance site, Mint first arrived on the scene. I was taken by the ease of use, the ability to manage multiple accounts via a single pane of glass. It was a game-changer, and not surprisingly they were quickly gobbled up by Intuit for what now seems like a steal at $170M. They were the precursor to what we are witnessing today; a purpose-built architecture designed to scrape, aggregate, analyze and present financial data in engaging, even fun interfaces that appeal to the next generation of users whose default experience demands immediacy, accessibility, and “instant gratification” society that demands 100 percent functionality — no exceptions! The pandemic has accelerated the pace of innovation and investment as in-person banking (which already was on its way out) is not only inconvenient but for some deemed as dangerous.

This is not just about startup disruptor companies of which there are hundreds with billions invested. The push for innovation continues to drive change in how banks deliver services. The household big bank names are all in. JPMorgan employs over 50,000 software developers, product managers, and designers. Bank of America is the world’s largest blockchain patent holder. Increasingly, even small regional banks are partnering with fintech startups. Over the past several years, the Fintech job market has exploded from below 100,000 jobs in mid-2015 to nearly 750,000 in 2019 with 37% of these jobs’ software engineering.

Today’s fintech engineers need to have the skills to navigate problems their predecessors never had to deal with — problems like full cloud integration, rapidly changing technology, daily release schedules, remote workforces, and experience with the latest cloud and end-user security technologies. Just because the services are delivered differently doesn’t mean that security, compliance, and regulation no longer matter.

As a technology staffing focused on cloud talent and marketing/creative talent representing several established household financial clients and well-funded startups, we have reviewed thousands of resumes and know what it takes for a software engineer to rise to the top of the applicant stack. Here are the top skills you ideally have to enter into a career in the fintech industry.

Cloud Computing

Today, odds are any new application is developed, tested, and run in the cloud. Even better odds that that cloud is one of the Big 3 cloud providers, Amazon, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. It’s important that you know how to work with data across various remote networks, rather than data stored in one location. While certifications are not necessarily always required, they do help get you noticed, however, certification(s) without any practical experience may not get you past a first interview. Managers want to know what you’ve managed and at what scale; how many instances? Service calls? Data size? Etc. Many of the boot camps offers today teach to the test not to learn the required skills. In response to this, Ursus launched a Cloud Apprenticeship program that offers both self-paced and 1:1 instruction. For more details visit the Certify-U Cloud Apprenticeship program overview.

Microservices

For engineers, building applications used to be a matter of creating one cohesive system with many built-in components. On one hand, this made it easy for engineers to work with all of their data points under one roof. On the other hand, it made it difficult to make small changes to scale an application. Think managing an aircraft carrier versus thousands of PT boats. Today, most engineers work with microservices — stand-alone services with individual goals that all work together to build larger applications. As a successful Fintech engineer, you need to be comfortable with this multi-faceted approach.

Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment (CICD)

Companies are shipping software today in minutes. Yeah, you read that right. Minutes. Not hours, not weeks, months, or longer. Minutes. The quarterly release schedule is dead and thus, it’s important that you know how to write code that can get to your users quickly and never lose functionality when changes are made. There are myriad CICD tools used today. Make sure you are comfortable and proficient with more than one.

Security & High Availability

In fintech when billions of dollars are being processed, it can be devastating to a business and customer with a network goes down. Remember, these companies in some form are you are dealing with what people and companies value most, their money! A data breach can be the death knell of many of these companies, especially the startups. Systems must maintain 100 percent operational if you want to be known for trusted and failure-proof technology, which means you need to know how to build and work with high availability systems and ensure that those systems are secure. The best way for fintech to safeguard its future is to keep an eye on circumstances driving its adoption, break with outdated security traditions that do not align with its trajectory, and over-engineer to prevent fraud and breach. Developers with a security background and practical experience are as valued and in demand as any.

Verbal & Written Communication Skills!

Whether you choose contract work or full-time employment the odds are high that you will need to collaborate with remote workers. The ability to communicate (verbally and written communication) remotely, work with a wide variety of people, and manage cross-country or international working relationships will make you more employable (and promotable).

For software developers, there are incredible opportunities to be part of teams contributing new ideas and services that will change the way people transact for years to come. There are numerous niches to be filled, new markets to serve and the market is hungry for new solutions to serve the market better than ever before. All of these companies’ innovators will need experienced software developers to lead them down the path to success in this new world.

After all, any new idea is only as good as its execution.

Finding qualified candidates has never been a simple task for companies. The Covid-19 pandemic has only heightened employers and job seekers frustration with the process. This conundrum is what makes our cloud talent recruiting firm all the most useful in today’s climate.

“As recently unemployed professionals flood the job market, employers are poised to experience an applicant overload,” iHire President and CEO Steve Flook said. “Although this will intensify the quest for qualified candidates and attribute to the ‘applicant black hole,’ we are optimistic that organizations will continue to make progress in addressing these challenges.”

The survey found 77.1% of employers are struggling to hire talent that checks all their boxes. In addition, 39.0% of employers said “receiving unqualified/irrelevant applicants” was their No. 1 challenge when recruiting through a job board.

Despite struggles with creative and technical recruiting, when it comes to hiring, 72.8% of employers said they were actively hiring despite the pandemic. This means that while the way in which companies are conducting business is changing, the need for qualified talent is consistent.

The survey also found 21.5% of candidates said they first go to industry-specific platforms when searching for a job, which is a substantial increase from 17.1% in a similar survey conducted in 2019.

The main takeaway from this study is that hiring and retention of creative and technical cloud talent is trickier than ever. Here at Ursus, we’re all about finding the right people, with the right skills, for the right jobs. Let us help you navigate the challenges that have come with Covid-19 and a saturated talent market.

**Included in the survey were 343 employers and 2,841 job seekers across 56 different industries.

Our team is in the middle of an exercise that we are calling “90 Days of Excellence”. In lieu of work travel and events, we are taking advantage of the “downtime” to sharpen our proverbial saws.   At our last quarterly meeting, each team member shared two personal development goals that they were going to focus on, track, and report back progress to the group the specific actions taken to not necessarily achieve the two goals but to be aware of steps taken towards improvement.

One of my two goals, was to STOP TALKING and listen more, especially when my team was presenting, solving and working problems.  Like many founders, CEO’s and managers, I have developed some annoying habits including but not limited to;

• Commenting on every conversation and topic rather than just shutting up and letting the team do their work.
• Stating my opinion or recommendation first rather than just listening or asking my team what or how they believe they should react or respond to a situation
• Dare I admit it…micromanaging?!?!

I know my intentions come from a good place.  This company is my baby.  I love it and the people who run it, built it and will take us where we all aspire to go.  In the last 45 days, by simply not talking and instead listening, I’ve been able to remind myself that we are a company comprised of really smart, experienced and passionate professionals.  Sometimes the best thing to do is get out of the way and let the team do their jobs!  The byproduct of my efforts has allowed me to delegate more to the team which leaves me more time to focus on the “bigger picture stuff” and to look ahead to what’s next versus the day to day that the team was hired to do.

When I do chime in now, my hope is my words are more impactful unlike in the past where I now realize I was competing with my own signal to noise ratio.  If I was growing tired of listening to myself, I can only imagine how my team must have felt.  As with anything else, the law of supply and demand holds true: If you constantly share your opinions, no one will seek them out. If you only say what you’re thinking on occasion, or only make a point one time instead of over and over, your words are likely to have more weight.

I have to admit it has not always been easy to shut up and, like any skill (and it is without question a skill), it has taken practice, patience, and discipline.  I want to jump in because I care but I now have my “Stop Talking” business card taped front and center on my monitor, and I invoke Stephen Covey’s adage to “Seek first to understand then to be understood.” several times a day. Sometimes, silence really IS golden…

Most people probably have said to themselves and others, at various points in their lives: “I want to be great!”, at being or doing something.  Expressing that desire is good, but not great; put differently, wanting to be great is a necessary but insufficient step towards greatness. What steps are sufficient to achieve greatness? And are you willing to take the many thousands of steps required? Answering these questions will determine whether you have the discipline to identify, take, and sustain these steps as not just means to an end, but as habits that (if repeated and ingrained) will enable greatness.  Wanting to take those steps and form those into such habits is good, but what you want doesn’t matter. What you’re willing to do, and sacrifice, to live habits that provide you the chance at greatness (because greatness is never guaranteed), does matter.

In the corporate world, as an executive or management team member, how do you nurture and model the habits that enable your employees to truly seek—not just want– and achieve greatness?  At the end of the day, my job as Founder and CEO at Ursus is to provide my team (management and employees) what they need to take their own steps towards greatness.  I don’t have to glow with greatness like a golden statue; it’s not about me. But I must create, build, and reinforce a corporate culture that gives them the opportunity to achieve greatness, and drive the success and prosperity of the (whole) enterprise in which we are all invested.

Early in my career, I was fortunate to have managers, coaches and mentors who instilled in me the importance of building a team or corporate culture that supported individuals’ and the enterprise’s success, rather than glorifying superstars and/or constricting individuals’ chances to be great.  Sadly, in this day of “celebrity” founders who enjoy their own glow, the professional culture in which I was “raised” is becoming rarer, and more difficult to establish. Examples are readily available, but the well-publicized examples such as The WeWork debacle and the rash of incidents and issues at Uber are quintessential; in both cases, ostensibly financially successful companies were built solely on the ideals, ego and arrogance of their founders, at the expense of their employees. .  The almost inevitable result is a culture that is nothing more than an echo chamber of one person’s opinion rather than the collective and shared expertise, experience and often wisdom of the employee base. And, equally inevitably, when the “magic” of the founders was tarnished or (in the case of WeWork) discovered as fraudulent, the companies’ performance and formerly glowing financials suffered. Ellen Pao’s excellent  piece in the October 2018 issue of Wired Magazine “Tech Founders’ Absolute Power Is Destroying Company Culture,” examines this grim phenomenon in more detail. So, how do executives and their management teams avoid creating (or permitting) one of the glowing “bad” examples of corporate culture, described above, and create a culture that promotes individual and TEAM greatness that can scale over time?

At Ursus, especially in and because of our services business context, our leadership team coaches, promotes, and reinforces (deliberately and systemically) employees’ habits across the company that will enable the culture to grow as the company itself grows and scales.  For example:

• Create, publish and refer back to a documented plan with specific steps towards achievement. 
  • Our growth plans are big, but we distill them all the way down to the little things, the daily if not hourly things required to achieve the larger enterprise goal(s) at the end of any given week, month, quarter or year.  
  • Specific, well-communicated strategies and tactics (our habits) are measured by our Key Performance Indicators (objective metrics) and are the substantive content of our plans (our enterprise-level Vision). 
  • Especially in small/startup companies, every employee should be able to clearly articulate the company’s processes and enterprise-level goals, and understand what his or her role is in achieving those goals. The employee’s personal goals must (in the aggregate) support the enterprise goals. This is a simple performance management concept, but more importantly, without a connection between personal and enterprise goals that individual employees can simply articulate and understand, the odds of company success decrease sharply. 
• Communicate & Repeat…and then Communicate some more. 
  • To support our Vision, we talk about our tactics and our habits daily. After all, a habit that isn’t repeatable and actually repeated isn’t a habit. We publish metrics that support, celebrate or provide data for course correction daily.  We carve out precious selling and recruiting time to train our team. We use our sourcing partners at LinkedIn, Indeed, Zip, Dice and JobDiva, as well as our clients and contractors who can share and reinforce what works for them when anyone from Ursus, as their partner, interacts with them. 
  • We never stop learning.  Lebron James, arguably the best basketball player on the planet, practices free throws every day!  Even though he’s shot millions of them, it’s his habit to continuously improve. If one change in the placement of his thumb improves his free throw percentage, and wins one critical game, why wouldn’t he want to learn and practice that? Similarly, if perhaps less dramatically, our best recruiters should work on improving their Boolean search strings; our best salespeople must work on their pitches or learn more about emerging technologies. We remind our team to continue to develop, stretch, grow and hone their habits. 
• Each employee should wake up and say, “today I will be better than I was yesterday,” and know that company leadership will support and nurture that commitment to continuous learning and improvement. How do they know? Leadership communicates it — daily.  Relentless learning is one of many habits that, if a company’s leadership supports it systemically, helps create a culture of good habits that permeates the organization. 
• Constructive Coaching 
  • A good coach celebrates success and learns from failure; not just what the team did poorly, but how coaching contributed to the failure.  Here in Silicon Valley, the dominant corporate culture celebrates glowing financials and deifies those who preside over overt monetary success. When you’re not “there” (for example, at a certain level of VC funding), if you’re not” making it,” by some Wall Street metric, some (even your peers) might deem you or your company a failure. This is “top-down” thinking, and while any business seeks growth and profits, I think that way of thinking is somewhat backwards (or upside down).  If as company leaders you continuously do the little things right, such as modeling good habits, while you also take care of your people and set them up to succeed, financial success will follow. 
  • Constructive coaching means the opposite of a (too-common) startup culture that cuts throats in the event of any type of failure or mistake.  Does a coach spend more time watching film of victories or defeats? I’d bet on the latter. Failure is not an indictment of who you are as a leader, or of your corporate culture. Failure prompts and enables learning (see above) and can reinforce good habits and a healthy corporate culture. Once you (all of you—leadership and employees) have survived some failures, then from a probability standpoint, you’re (all) more likely to be successful in the future. “Success is not final; Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill

Corporate leaders should nurture and model a simple but powerful culture that connects personal, team, and enterprise goals, and rewards the habits that provide the support structure for those goals. These good habits will, over time, enable your company to leverage and overcome temporary failures, or small mistakes (and avoid big ones). But, for each employee, achieving greatness is a grind and a choice, or more accurately, a series of each employee’s choices to do what he or she must rather than what he or she wants. As executives and managers, you create the culture and communicate the Vision that enables each employee to pursue greatness, confident that their leadership supports their efforts.

Wait, what?  You just closed your Series A round for $13M (the average dollar amount raised in a 2019 Series A round)? That’s fantastic! Congratulations!  And with all due respect, such a fundraising achievement is well worth celebrating, because it IS a big deal.  So, after the press release hits the newswires and social media, enjoy the moment and take your company out for dinner and drinks. 

BUT, later that night or at breakfast the next morning, gather your fellow founders or executive team, take out the bottle labeled “Reality Pills” and urge each to gulp down at least one.  Why should founders and executives do such a thing? 

Well, for starters, it’s always prudent to temper success with humility. And as you present yourself and your company to potential candidates (e.g., your developers, product managers, and engineers), be honest. More specifically, recognize that your newly funded startup immediately will be jockeying to recruit talent amongst hundreds of other, just as well funded, “hot” companies whose ideas will “change the world.” Not to mention the sexy household brand names like Google, Facebook, eBay, Amazon, Microsoft and other companies (disclaimer, many of these companies are Ursus clients), including the 142 newly minted “Unicorns” of 2019, that already have changed the world.  You are competing with all of them too! By all means, try to hire the best of the best, swing for the fences, aim high, shoot the moon (choose your most motivational active metaphor) when you recruit.  But know that your company is one among many choices for candidates in what today is, like it or not, a shallow talent pool with plenty of options.  

So, in order to ensure that your company secures the human resource capacity to execute on the operating plan that convinced your venture partners to fund you (and funded your celebration), the company’s founders and executives must be prepared to compete, negotiate, acquiesce when necessary, and—most importantly–make swift and definitive decisions about which and how many people to hire.  

As the Founder and CEO of Ursus, which as a staffing and services company has placed thousands of contractors and full-time employees in Silicon Valley and across the United States, my advice, for what it’s worth, is this:

• Define and know through a well-crafted job description what type of employee (or contractor) your company ideally would want to hire, even if it is the elusive “purple squirrel;” but also identify those types of people whom the company needs to hire, now, to continue to execute your operating plan. 
• Consider hiring contractors, not employees.  
  • Too often, startups with fresh new funding believe they should only hire full-time employees (FTEs). A contractor or contract-to-hire option is a low-risk, relatively less expensive (low to no overhead burden) way for a company and candidate to determine if a long-term relationship is in everyone’s best interests. If a company cannot answer the question of why it should shoulder the risk and expense to hire FTEs who may or may not “match” long-term, when it could “try before it buys” with less permanent hiring, then the latter option poses fewer and less expensive risks. 
• “We can’t find talent” is not an excuse that any executive wants to present to a Board of Directors.  
  • If a company’s operating plan shows headcount growth, then it must be able to present a viable plan to fill those roles – inside recruiters, personal network, your venture partners, or a professional firm like Ursus are all options. 
• Don’t settle, but right size or break job functions into pieces.  
  • Too often, startups or early stage companies try to squeeze three jobs into one role, usually in an attempt to reduce costs. Executives and managers should not do this unless they enjoy explaining high and increasing employee churn numbers to the company’s venture partners or Board of Directors.  
• Trust the market data. 
  • Staffing companies see the same job openings over and over again and know what the market cost for talent is.  If you don’t believe your staffing partners, purchase market research or ask your venture investors to share data with you.  You may not like the price of talent, but if you want to compete (with both the “hot” new and the already-have-changed-the-world companies), your company must budget for the best attainable talent.  
• Be prepared to act, sell and negotiate. 
  • Time kills all deals. Be decisive about hiring the right candidate. Don’t hesitate or even worse, don’t get cute and prolong the process by adding additional steps or thinking you need to compare a start candidate with two or three others, as if you’re buying a commodity.  If as part of your corporate culture, and as a hiring decision-maker, your company and you aren’t decisive, you will lose the candidate, and lose/waste time repeating the process. Remember, as an executive or manager, you are trying to run your business while you build it. You don’t have time to waste. 
• Let go a little and don’t hold on so tight. 
  • Every new employee is important to your company’s future but agonizing over each and every hire is counterproductive. That said, hiring the wrong person, especially as an FTE, could be riskier than hiring a contractor or not hiring at all.

After more than 20 years as an executive in Silicon Valley, and having lived through five successful liquidity events, the company I founded (Ursus) is my “baby.” And even though my

¹ From: http://hoopthoughts.blogspot.com/2015/06/bo-schembechler-on-why-its-important-to.html

“Yesterday I posted a blog on an amazing article written by Jen Sinkler  on rugby coach Jack Clark.  You can read the post here.  Still, I’m going to repeat a small portion of that blog dealing with Clark talking to Sinkler about something he learned from Bo Schembechler.  For all of us that recruit, it’s a great reminder of the importance of not just recruiting the best players but recruiting the right players — and there’s a big difference:

It was one of the, if not most, iconic lines in the 80’s movie classic, ‘Top Gun’.  It happened while Tom Cruise, as Maverick, and his co-pilot “Goose” were prepping for flight. “I feel the need, the need for speed” applies not only to flying multi-million jet fighters, but to many other disciplines. Two that immediately come to mind: 1) bidding on a house and 2) trying to hire a technical resource in Silicon Valley. So how, you ask, are these disciplines even remotely related to one another? Please, allow me to explain!

Any one attempting to buy a home in the San Francisco Bay Area knows (or will quickly learn) that if you don’t have your proverbial ducks in a row –  loan pre-approval letters, credit reports, references, inspection agencies ready to review properties, and being mentally prepared to present an offer at or above asking price – you are not prepared.  In short, being serious about buying a home in this part of world requires preparation for all possible outcomes, with all required documentation ready to rock when offers are due (because you won’t have any time to think beyond deadlines mandated by sellers).  Oh, and sorry if you need your wife, parents, or best friend to see the house a day or two later, want to ask for contingencies, or you need to “take a day or two to think about it.” If you’re not ready to make the jump to light-speed right then and there, you may as well not bid at all because you’ve already missed out; if you aren’t committed to the insanity of this process and ready to make rapid decisions, renting might be a better option (although that can prove to be just as, if not more, competitive).

I speak from personal experience, having learned all the above the hard way when I set out to purchase my first Bay Area home. I was continually outbid or, when I tried to get cute by presenting contingent offers, would proceed to lose the bid.  It wasn’t until my broker finally sat me down over a cup of coffee and gave me the tough love I needed.  “Dude, when I tell you that you need to move faster, I’m not suggesting that you make reckless decisions, but that you make purposeful decisions.”  Moving quickly, or with speed, does not automatically equal recklessness or irresponsibility. It means having everything lined up to move through the process quickly while being mentally focused and prepared to make decisions.  My hiring managers, all of whom I value, respect and in some cases love, know this; the workforce is more mobile and flexible than ever. Candidates change jobs more regularly, with more employment options like remote working, group hiring and outsourcing. There are more choices now than ever before.

Make no mistake, it’s still a seller’s (read: candidates) market.  The best candidates will still be in demand, as always, and the previously generally accepted four to eight weeks interviewing process is still far too long.  We all need to recognize that the very best candidates count their idle period in days, not weeks.  How do we address this need for speed across IT recruiting?  Three thoughts to consider:

• Create and clearly communicate your hiring plan and process. Make certain your hiring process is communicated and accepted by internal stakeholders and candidates. Make certain that all participants understand and can comply with defined timelines for interviews, feedback and decisions.
• Understand, revise, and build consensus in your hiring criteria. Hiring managers are usually given a set of criteria, from the top down, to find talent. Often these requirements are created by Human Resources generalists who are not familiar or versed in your technical lexicon, let alone in the soft skills that are, in many cases, unique and/or demanding, all of which ultimately determine a successful hire. Push back! The job overview is your Technicolor advertisement to the market, so if it’s inaccurate you’ve lost a golden opportunity.  Taking care to build a compelling, thorough- and yes, sexy – job description will go a very long way when locating and hiring top talent; it allows a hiring manager or recruiter to be more selective with candidates they choose to bring in for interviews, accelerating the hiring process and, in turn, securing the best candidates at a much faster rate.
• Contract To Hire – Test-drive candidates. Contract to Hire (CTH) is common practice for companies to impose what is effectively a paid test-drive or probation period to ensure the new hire is a good fit for the position and works well with the team. This allows companies and teams to gain hands-on experience and work directly with an incumbent.  This technique may seem somewhat unorthodox, but remember that it also allows prospective employees to test-drive your company. You may be looking to hire amazing talent, but candidates are also looking for the perfect company; a company where they will not only feel comfortable, but also excited to be a part of your team, investing their talent and energies to build a long career.  CTH also mitigates risk for all since contractors do not come with the full-time employee burden. If there isn’t a good fit, the contract may be terminated at any time.

As an employer, it’s critically important to understand that every day you haven’t filled a position that solves a business problem, you and your company are losing money. Missing out on the best talent in a competitive market because your rivals are more decisive won’t fly since it’s avoidable (see above)!  Please let me reiterate. I’m not promoting reckless, capricious decisions for the sake of speed.  Without question, a bad hire can cost your business thousands of dollars and set projects back for months. However, flip that scenario and remember that delaying a hiring process or hiring decision can cost you and your business dearly, too.